How to create an organic gradient animation using a WebGL shader. How to create an organic gradient animation using a WebGL shader.

House building using the “Oraaflex” modular construction system, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become...

Note: The logic described in this post may be a stepping stone to a more robust system in the future. Please keep that in mind as you read and know that my solution may not be optimal, rather a start toward solving a problem. This morning I opened Artemis and found a website I had been following for a few months had published almost a dozen posts today. The website was now, unfortunately, a zombie site . This experience left me with two questions: What should Artemis do if a site publishes sign...

When I’ve read other series about Kubernetes and reach the secrets section my eyes glaze over. I can’t help myself; I want to read about the fun stuff. Secrets are necessary to be sure, but it’s a little boring… But if I want to do proper GitOps I need to manage secrets (and to document the process). The sooner I set it up the better. In and outside cluster Kubernetes has different solutions for secrets management. Of particular note is Sealed Secrets which creates files that a...

What Garnet Chan cares most about is basic science. He entered chemistry decades ago to understand some of the most consequential biochemical processes on Earth. But since then, he’s become a central figure in a different arena: the debate over whether quantum computers will have a decisive advantage over ordinary “classical” ones. Over the past decade, many quantum computing researchers have… Source What Garnet Chan cares most about is basic science. He entered chemistry decades ago ...

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement: Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor. There’s still more to be done: we’re working on developing and releasing models that provide many of the same capabilities as Opus at a lower cost. It's so refreshing to see an AI lab honestly describe a release as a minor incremental improvement over the previous model! Honesty seems to...

Where is your intelligence located? In your brain? It is a simplistic answer. A better model is that your intelligence is embodied. Consider a cook working at an expensive restaurant. He has all his favorite knives and cooking instructions, placed exactly where he wants them. His kitchen is part of his intelligence, of his skills. The same cook working in your kitchen can probably cook better than you do, but he can’t reproduce the same meals he would prepare in his favorite kitchen. We ...

This is going to come as a shock—a SHOCK —to some of you, but I harboured a not insignificant obsession with liners when I was a teenager, both of the ocean and air kind. I loved reading about commercial ships and planes of yore, learning about how they were operated, and contrasting them to how we get around today. Some of my favourite tomes were technical reference manuals and so-called “coffee table” books that explored these incredible machines. You could keep your books on cars and...

There are only two ways to use LLMs in a computer program: as part of a pipeline, or as an agent. In other words, either you express the control flow of the program in code, or you give a LLM tools and allow it to manage the control flow itself 1 . Here’s how you might structure a trivial “summarize a bunch of information and email it to me” program as a pipeline: context = gather_context ( various , data , sources ) llm_response = llm_summarize ( context ) summary = parse ( ...

Here we go again. Afternoon walk this time around. It’s almost 2pm, and I’m standing in the same parking spot where I got picked up last week. No breakfast in me, but I did have lunch before heading out. Compared to last week’s hike, this one’s gonna be way easier. We have a bit more than 20kms to walk, with roughly 650 meters of ascent and 1300 of descent. Gonna be fun. Before we begin, I’ll have to apologise for the terrible photos I took, especially of the churches. Been a weird w...

Drive-by AI changes break the shared model a team builds around its code, and the ICs end up cleaning up the mess. Why pushing to mainline should come with the pager. Drive-by AI changes break the shared model a team builds around its code, and the ICs end up cleaning up the mess. Why pushing to mainline should come with the pager.

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip was highly influential, and today most processors use the floating-point standard introduced by the 8087. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to accurately compute functions such as square roots, tangents, and exponentials. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in low-level code called microcode. I'm part of a group, the Opcode Collective, tha...

Summary: People have tried extending rock-paper-scissors to more than 3 options, with some success. If you allow more pairings to be ties, this uncovers a rich garden of different game dynamics and strategies. As far as a battle of wits go, it’s hard to find a more balanced game than rock-paper-scissors. Its simplicity means that all strategy is scraped away, and all that’s left is to cold read the other person’s soul. Come, stare into my eyes, and I’ll see the weapon you’ll ...

Hello, It has been some time, and we're happy to share some news with you today. 2.1 plan We have been working on the major 2.1 update for Factorio and Space age for the last 8 months, and it has been shaping up quite well. Scope and expectations Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing. That is to say, we d...

Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the Current conference in London with the usual 5k run , lots of familiar faces and friendly conversations—and plenty of excellent breakout sessions too. It seems live-tweeting conferences isn’t a thing any more, with only myself and Thomas Cooper seeming to post anything, but if you want you can go review the hashtag feed on BlueSky for some highlights of the conference. Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the...

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but none of the internal processes that happen when we write code by hand . As a quick primer, the human brain has several types of memory, short-term, working, and long-term. Short-term memory gathers information temporarily and processes it quickly, like RAM. Long-term memory includes t...

Unary codes are a form of universal variable-length code (UVLC) that are sometimes used on their own but more commonly used as a building block for more general families of UVLCs like Golomb, Rice or Gamma / Exp-Golomb codes. There are multiple conventions in use, the one I’ll use in the following has codewords terminated with a “1” bit and is 0-based, i.e. the codebook goes 0 -> 1 1 -> 01 2 -> 001 3 -> 0001 4 -> 00001 and so forth. That is, some value i ...

Workplace distractions cost the US economy an estimated $650 billion per year, according to a 2026 Gitnux report. The average knowledge worker now loses close to 4 hours daily to interruptions and task-switching. This article covers the latest workplace distraction statistics for 2026, including focus rates, productivity costs, top distraction sources, meeting overload data, and what the numbers say about remote and hybrid work environments. Workplace Distraction Statistics — Key Highlights...

I was thinking of doing something special for the 100th post, but I could not decide what to do, so instead I'll do just some random bits and pieces. I've been living on the Internet since the early 00s and during that time I had many different blogs and blog-like sites. Some disappeared of natural causes, some can still be found. A photo from one of my blog posts from 2009. This is my laptop of that time, a HP Compaq with which I have very fond memories. It's placed on the floor of the ro...

My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value ) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category. My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off his computing journey, I thought I'd let him choose f...

Little’s Law states that in a stable system, L = λW, where: L = mean number of customers in the system λ = mean arrival rate W = mean time a customer spends in the system The law holds regardless of arrival or service distributions, number of servers, or scheduling discipline. Why It Is Surprising Little’s Law holds without any assumptions about the distribution of arrival rates or service times. It does not matter whether arrivals are Poisson, deterministic, or correlated,...

This was posted at about 01:30am so it's probably full or errors but whatever I never back out of writing a post all in one go. If I've spoken to you in the past week, I probably mentioned playing around with Plan 9 . After getting an old PC on ebay for 30€ (~40€ with shipping) I thought "if I was ever going to install this, now is the time". Shout out to Matt for the hint of what to look for to get real cheap used PCs on ebay; which we talked about a bit on an IndieWeb pop-up about B...

M1 M2 M3 L $T 2.0 $100 bills 0.12 $50 bills 0.22 $20 bills 0.05 $1, $2, $5, $10 bills + coin 3.0 Household demand deposits at commercial banks 0.4 Household demand deposits at credit unions + thrifts 3.4 Business + government + foreign demand deposits 5.3 Savings deposits — passbook + statement + online 4.0 Money market deposit accounts — MMDAs 1.0 Interest-bearing checking — NOW + ATS accounts ...